How do you get a spine in a team? How do you get resilience in a team? Success is always built around spine and resilience, because sooner or later the going gets tough; that’s life. More is needed that those two attributes. We need talent, a plan, cohesion, passion etc, etc. But without spine and ability to get up when you have been knocked down, you, me and Arsenal football club get nowhere.
We started tentatively against Bayern on Wednesday, handing them the initiative and soaking up pressure as much as we could. Boll*ck-on-a-neck Robben had scored a very fine goal, which we all knew was coming as soon as Coquelin had been fooled and allowed space for the ageless Robben to hit his left-footed bullet against the back of the net. After that we rode our luck and then came back into the game through a badly taken penalty that still made it ...